Page 31 of Heart of Danger
“Mac?” She tried again. “It seemed as if Stella wanted you to talk to me. She said something about me joining the community. I guess she meant the community here?”
He closed his eyes as if in pain and took in a deep breath. Wow. She’d touched a nerve, a painful one.
Well, of course.
Catherine Young didn’t do communities. She had always been rejected like foreign tissue. In her family, in the small town in Massachusetts she grew up in, in college and graduate school, at her first job in Chicago. By the time she got her current job she didn’t even try to fit in. She just went in to work, did her job, went home. Any attempts are joining groups inevitably failed.
Different, different. She wasdifferent.
Never mind. She’d formulated the words in her head but they hadn’t left her mouth when he turned fully to her, eyes pinned to hers. And to her vast shame, having him look at her so intensely made her knees weaken. She had to consciously stiffen them to stay upright.
This was terrible. Her own body was rebelling against her, turning her weak when she should be strong. When she had to be strong, because maybe her life depended on it.
Mac waved a big hand at the scene below. An elderly gentleman saw, thought Mac was waving and waved happily back.
“This was originally a silver mine. It was panned out and abandoned way back in the 1950s. I knew about it because I grew up in a series of foster homes down in the valley. They weren’t the kind of foster homes that kept a close eye on their kids. All they kept their eye on was the bank accounts, to make sure the state paid on time. When I was fourteen, I found a motorcycle abandoned in the junkyard. I’m good with my hands. I scrounged parts, built it up. Spent the next four years until I joined the military exploring. Found this place. When we needed a hideout, I brought us here.”
He needed a hideout? Catherine didn’t go there. Of course he needed a hideout. Thiswasa hideout, like the famous Hole in the Wall in the Wild West. A place where, if you could find it, if you could make your way there, you’d be safe.
She looked around, then back at the man who was watching her so steadily. “You did some work.” That was an understatement. What she was seeing wasn’t an abandoned mine. It had been turned into a high tech town.
“Yeah.” One side of his hard mouth turned up and it took her a second to recognize it as a smile. A smile seemed like the furthest possible thing his face could do, something completely alien to it. And yet—and yet it was a nice smile, small though it was. “We had to?—”
He stopped, head cocked, tapped his ear.
“Yeah,” he said suddenly, “Roger that. Coming right now.” And he grabbed her elbow and started walking, grim-faced once more.
Smiling time was over, evidently. And whatever had happened, it involved her. She looked up at him, searching for clues. His face was so hard, so remote. Nothing at all could be read there.
Catherine trotted to keep up with him, wondering whether she was moving to her doom. If she was, she was moving toward it fast.
They walked along the corridor until they came to a glass-enclosed elevator. It whooshed down so quickly and silently it was almost like flying, opening onto the floor of the atrium.
Mac took one of the pathways and Catherine followed. It felt like plunging into a forest. The greenery was even denser than it appeared from above, a thick green canopy that wouldn’t be out of place in Amazonia. The air here felt cooler, smelled incredibly fresh, as if it were the outdoors instead of in some kind of high-tech cavern.
It wasn’t a just city park. A pretty break in a wall of buildings like most city parks were. It felt primal, not decorative. Utilitarian, all that beauty a side effect. Every now and again she saw signs of small scale cultivated crops. A pumpkin patch with plump orange pumpkins the size of boulders. Another small patch of artichokes. They passed a grove of oranges that smelled divine, rushing past it so fast she barely had time to smell it.
Again, everyone they met waved hello to Mac and looked curiously at Catherine being tugged along. The looks weren’t hostile in any way. Just curious. One man dressed in work clothes with a toolkit belt tried to stop Mac, who rotated his index finger—later—and whizzed past.
They pulled up in a side corridor where Mac ran full tilt toward a white door. Catherine was about to shout at him to stop when the door slid open at the last second. She rushed through it behind him and it slid closed behind her the moment she crossed the threshold.
CHAPTERSEVEN
SAN FRANCISCO—ARKA PHARMACEUTICALS
“Still gone, boss.”Barings was reporting from outside Catherine Young’s home, a small bungalow just off University Drive.
“Video,” Lee replied and a holo appeared in front of him. The outside was unassuming. Real estate prices were extremely high in the area and young professionals couldn’t afford much more than what Catherine had rented. “Get inside.”
Interesting.
The outside was bland, but Young had turned the inside of her home into a jewel.
Very interesting.
Lee had always considered Young an excellent researcher with nothing else to her. She had made no close friends in the company. She never went to the few company mixers Lee organized, more to get a feeling for his employees than a desire to ensure they had a healthy social life. He had his security team check everyone’s finances as a matter of course, with a bot checking for unusual income or expenditures. Young’s finances had never triggered a trip wire, ever. Her only income was her salary, and she saved 10% of it regularly, the rest going to normal expenditures and the maximum allowed in the company 401 (k) plan.
Young was the most talented and least interesting of his employees. No boyfriends, few social contacts, no vices.
